Measuring senescence in wild animal populations: towards a longitudinal approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1 A major current challenge in ageing research is to understand why senescence rates vary between individuals, populations and species in wild populations. 2 Recent studies clearly illustrate that senescent declines in key demographic and life-history traits can be observed in many wild animal systems. 3 Here, we summarize the key challenges facing researchers working to understand senescence in the wild. We concentrate on: (i) limited data availability, (ii) the substantial individual heterogeneity typical of wild populations, (iii) incomplete capture histories, and (iv) trade-offs across the life span. 4 We discuss analytical methods to overcome these challenges. We advocate the use of Capture–Mark–Recapture models to remove likely bias associated with re-sampling rates of less than one. We also illustrate that ageing trajectories may vary between different traits in wild populations. Wherever possible, researchers should examine ageing patterns in multiple traits. 5 Numerous models are available to describe the rate and shape of senescence in free-living populations, but there is currently little consensus regarding which is most appropriate in analyses of wild organisms. 6 We argue that only longitudinal studies of marked or recognizable individuals provide reliable sources of information in the study of senescence. Senescence is a within-individual process and only longitudinal studies allow researchers to separate within-individual ageing patterns from between-individual heterogeneity. 7 We examine two analytical approaches to measure ageing using longitudinal data from wild populations: a jack-knifing approach, well-suited to modelling survival probability, and a mixed-effects model approach. Both methods control for sources of between-individual heterogeneity to allow more accurate measurement of within-individual ageing patterns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".